6. Adam

It’s always on your terms.

My own words played through my thoughts on repeat. I’d meant what I’d said. Yet it was turning out to be more difficult than I could’ve imagined. I fucking wanted Tessa. And now, I was waiting. For her.

I was practical enough to be aware of what it meant for her to be a single mom. Maybe I didn’t know much about her life, but I suspected she was busy. Inconveniently, when I was stopping by the grocery store, the very evening after I saw her in the office, I saw her ex Rich in the grocery store. He was on the phone. He was one of the guys who talked on the phone as though he wasn’t in the middle of everywhere, just oblivious to anything going on around him. He’d been in line, and the young guy at the register had to wait while Rich bitched to someone about preferring to cancel his visit with his son, but knowing it wouldn’t look good with the court.

I wanted to clock the guy. Well, not really. I’d never laid a hand on anyone.

The following afternoon, I was deep into analyzing a budgetary plan for an expansion when my twin brother Kenan knocked on my door before peering inside.

“Hey, hey.”

I smiled out of habit and because I was almost always glad to see Kenan. We were so different, yet we knew each other so well.

“What’s up?” He strolled into my office, plunking in the chair directly across from my desk. He immediately reached for a Slinky that I kept there solely for him. Kenan was one of those fidgety people who always did something with his hands.

“Just looking at our plans for expanding the operations in Willow Brook and adding a new location down in Seattle,” I explained.

“For offices?” His brow furrowed in confusion.

“Oh no. We’re done with offices there. Another distribution location for the renewable batteries we’re producing in Willow Brook.”

Kenan nodded. “Ah, I knew this.” He flashed a grin.

“You always know everything,” I returned with a brow waggle.

“Well, not everything, and I definitely never know when you or Rhys might change your mind.”

I rolled my eyes and glanced down to tap Save on my computer.

My brother sobered after a beat. “Have you seen Mom lately?”

“I see her every week,” I said. We all did. We were close. All of us.

“Quinn mentioned she stopped by to drop something off and said Mom seems down, I guess, ever since McKenna finally talked about things.”

I held my brother’s gaze. “I know,” I finally said, an old, achy pain sharpening in my heart.

As one of eight siblings whose oldest brother drank himself to death before graduating from college, it was fair to say our family history was a tangled mess.

“Do you think there’s more she doesn’t know?” Kenan asked, his eyes worried.

I took a slow breath. Kenan and I were smack in the middle of the family. We had two older brothers, a younger set of twin brothers, and a younger sister. We probably knew the most about everyone in the family from our vantage point.

The one secret none of us had known, except for our cousin Archer, had been that Jake had been sexually abused by our grandfather. The same grandfather who had been verbally abusive to all of us and physically abusive to Jake, Rhys, and Blake.

Kenan and I knew most of the rest, but only bits and pieces. Jake had had a terrible temper, and our sister, McKenna, had been the target of his bullying. While we’d never spoken of it when we were kids, we tried to protect her when we could.

Somehow, I felt like the one who had to carry all of it.

I shrugged because I didn’t know the answer. “I’m just glad McKenna finally talked to Mom.”

“And Wyatt?” Kenan prompted.

Griffin and Wyatt were the other twins and had only recently moved back to Fireweed Harbor. Wyatt never said why, but you could sometimes feel his distance.

“That’s his story.”

Siblings were messy sometimes. We all kept each other’s secrets.

We were the peacekeepers. Kenan was the one who did everything anybody needed to keep the peace and the joker who tried to lighten every tense moment. I was the more serious one, the one who dared Jake to hit me instead of McKenna. Jake never took me up on that.

“Mom will be okay. We’ll all be okay,” I added.

Kenan tended to be more serious with me than with the larger group of us. I would never know, but sometimes it felt like we’d made a deal before we were ever born. We would take care of each other and the rest of the family.

Kenan drummed his fingertips on the arm of the chair before he nodded once sharply.

“How’s blissful married life?” I wanted to shift gears in this conversation.

Kenan had finally come to his senses and married his best friend, Quinn.

A wide smile cracked across his face. “It’s blissful.”

I chuckled. “You’re set for life.”

Kenan murmured a sound of agreement before angling his head to the side and studying me. “What about you?” My twin was more perceptive than he let on. He always had been.

“What do you mean?” I hedged.

“Are you set for life?”

I shrugged lightly. “Maybe.”

With anyone other than my twin, I might’ve flatly insisted I was. But Kenan knew better. He was the only person I’d ever told about discovering Julie had wanted to break up. It wasn’t that I thought we would’ve been together forever. It burned that she hadn’t talked to me about it.

For a split second, I wanted to ask him what he knew about Tessa. I knew Tessa, but she’d always been on the edges of my life. Quinn was one of her closest friends, so I had no doubt Kenan encountered her often since he’d gotten married.

“What is it?” he prompted.

Kenan wasn’t an actual mind reader. He didn’t know I wanted to ask about Tessa. He just knew I wanted to ask about something.

“Nothing.”

A sly gleam entered his gaze. “You’ll ask me at some point, so you might as well cut to the chase.”

A dry laugh rustled in my throat. “True enough. When the time is right.”

“Fine.” He stood from his chair, tapping his knuckles on my desk. “For what it’s worth, I don’t think you’re cut out to be alone for the rest of your life.”

This wasn’t the first time he’d made that observation. Until that brief encounter with Tessa, I would’ve dismissed it. Now, I was busy trying to tell myself I could keep the boundaries in my heart delineated.

After Kenan left my office, my eyes slid to my cell phone where it sat silently on my desk. I wasn’t a guy who waited for texts. Yet with Tessa, I was. I had lobbed the ball into her court, and now I waited.